The doctor lowered his eyes. ‘Perhaps that is what I meant—but sometimes I am mistaken.’ He looked at Felix from under his heavy brows. ‘Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on those two themes—whistles his tune.’
The Baron leaned forward. He said, in a low voice, ‘Was the Baronin damned?’
The doctor deliberated for a second, knowing what Felix had hidden in his question. ‘Guido is not damned,’ he said, and the Baron turned away quickly. ‘Guido’, the doctor went on, ‘is blessed—he is peace of mind—he is what you have always been looking for—Aristocracy’, he said smiling, ‘is a condition in the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better—funny,’ he added sharply, ‘that a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for.’
‘And the Baronin,’ Felix said, ‘do you ever hear from her?’
‘She is in America now, but of course you know that. Yes, she writes, now and again, not to me—God forbid—to others.’
‘What does she say?’ the Baron said, trying not to show his emotion.
‘She says,’ the doctor answered, “Remember me.” Probably because she has difficulty in remembering herself.’
The Baron caught his monocle. ‘Altamonte, who has been in America, tells me that she seemed “estranged". Once’, he said, pinching his monocle into place, ‘I wanted, as you, who are aware of everything, know, to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time; good, perhaps that that is an impossible ambition for the sane mind. One has, I am now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.’
Taking out his handkerchief, the Baron removed his monocle, wiping it carefully.
Carrying a pocket full of medicines, and a little flask of oil for the chapping hands of his son, Felix rode into Vienna, the child beside him; Frau Mann, opulent and gay, opposite, holding a rug for the boy’s feet. Felix drank heavily now, and to hide the red that flushed his cheeks he had grown a beard ending in two forked points on his chin. In the matter of drink, Frau Mann was now no bad second. Many cafés saw this odd trio, the child in the midst wearing heavy lenses that made his eyes drift forward, sitting erect, his neck holding his head at attention, watching his father’s coins roll, as the night drew out, farther and farther across the floor and under the feet of the musicians as Felix called for military music, for Wacht am Rhein, for Morgenrot, for Wagner; his monocle dimmed by the heat of the room, perfectly correct and drunk, trying not to look for what he had always sought, the son of a once great house; his eyes either gazing at the ceiling or lowered where his hand, on the table, struck thumb and little finger against the wood in rhythm with the music, as if he were playing only the two important notes of an octave, the low and the high; or nodding his head and smiling at his child, as mechanical toys nod to the touch of an infant’s hand, Guido pressing his own hand against his stomach where, beneath his shirt, he could feel the medallion against his flesh, Frau Mann gripping her beer mug firmly, laughing and talking loudly.